dodging_prison_and_stealing_witchesfandomcom-20200214-history
User blog:Sfu/The DPaSW history by sfu in 2018
It has been one year since the last blog entry I did and it is about damn time to reflect on the current last year. This blog will feature stuff that changed, stuff which went awesome, but also stuff which did not go so well. And there is tons of everything, so I decided to address it in thematically assigned groups. Wikia itself Or better said former wikia. Wikia had a name change to fandom. The wiki'ish articles are about different fandoms made by the different fandoms and the now-named Fandom stuff changed it accordingly. Thus the site was dubbed fandom.com. Additionally I decided to change the former hpdpasw.fandom.com url towards dodging-prison-and-stealing-witches.fandom.com. The original idea had it merits, but I wasn't very happy with it. After some discussings with people, I changed it to the longer term and haven't second-guessed the change since then. Another important change from about a year ago was a bigger re-design as well as a restructuring of the wiki. I cannot remember anymore how the wiki looked like back then, but am happy with what we have now. The restructuring made it at least for me, a lot of easier to use and to categorise articles faster. For further comparison, last year we had about 80 articles, which are now up to 190. A huge shout out to Jay's Feather for helping out here and there. TV Tropes page created There is also a TV Tropes page now, created by and updated several users. It is very thorough so far and does shine some light on interesting things found in the story. Twitch.tv streams That one started already waaaay back then. The original reader Sorenschild did not find time anymore to read the DP&SW chapters and stepped down. He did though do the first 12 chapters, thus completed book 1 and for that a huge thank you to him! Instead of finding a suitable replacement somewhere, LeadVonE started doing it himself. The first time he simply recorded himself reading it and then shared the file internally. The group of audio workers worked on it through amazon work spaces, virtual machines, and other very interesting setups so all people would work on one file only, instead of being forced to share it between themselves. In the end though it did not work out as well. But since TrendyTreky joined the team, a lot of stuff did speed up. He always does the first revisions of the raw audio chapters in an amazing tempo. Post editing after him takes still 4 hours, but that is way less overall and we could speed up the release tempo. One other important thing that changed was LeadVonE actually doing internal recording sessions via Discord. Us editors would listen to him, to point out mistakes and or to re-do parts. After some successful sessions we actually started to stream it via twitch, where Ben was the actual streamer, taking the audio of LeadVonE from Discord. After an internet and computer upgrade, LeadVonE started doing everything by himself. To sum everything up, we went from 12 audio chapters towards 20 and with up to 24 in raw files. There was a lot of amazing work done there and a huge shout out to the audio team <3! User contributed stuff A lot of Omake have been written since the start of the Discord and they now all found their new home on fanfic.leadvone.com. There is not much to say about it but a huge shoutout to the writers, and especially Chuck, writing their ingenious Omakes, the artist Lunatico drawing fantastic fanart and to LeadVonE for providing the webspace. Slytherin Manor in 3D LeadVonE shared the Slytherin Manor plans via Discord and Lunatico and I decided to visualize it. Lunatico used Blender, while I did it with Minecraft. The completed Slytherin Manor minecraft map can be found in the #fancontent channel with signs explaining where you're actually going in that huge maze. The blender progress is also archived there. DP&SW inspired stories Next to the numerous omake, Ozzie as well as nuclear death frog started their own DP&SW inspired stories. NDF did a similar setting as LVE, but with Harry becoming Lord Gryffindor and Ozzie set up the whole story in the Naruto fandom instead. For both stories we have channels to discuss them on the Discord server below the LEADVONE category, where the authors even share some snippets. Discord bots A lot of improvement there. For one we have user roles now where people can show their alignment towards different characters in the story. Then for two, we also used it as a way so people can get specific notifications towards livestreams, audiot chapters or Omake. Lastly, there is the amazing ffnbot written by vlaai. It parses ffn and ao3 stories beautifully and makes sharing stories sooo much easier. A huge shout out to him for making it possible. Less activity on Discord With time the activity on the Discord server dropped down immensely. It is something I expected due to different reasons. One is the novum of being able to discuss DP&SW finally with a lot of different people, but there is only limited material to be discussed with. Further lots of people who joined have never been in a bigger internet community and learned the up as well as downsides of such, until they had enough there. One important thing was also that as a server admin I could have provided more incentives for people to talk on the server. It would have required though lots of work and time, which I could not provide next to the administrative work. Additionally real life applies everywhere, also for me, so time got limited a lot. If you have to decide whether it's worth it to spend the time on Dicord, or more important real life things, Discord should never win. I personally really enjoy DP&SW and the other work of LeadVonE, so it's easy for me to like be on the Discord and talk with people, while still maintaining work as well as real life. But we still have really amazing discussions, user contributions and similar, and for that I am very grateful. Especially Evilincarnate's as well as Xenarthran's works shined through a lot this past year. Discord channels Lots of them got removed, or combined with other due to less activity as well. But there are still a lot out there. Last year we had only 27. Now we have 8 with mod only access, 7 Patreon channels, 7 information channels at the top, 2 archive or self-promotion channels, 2 audio people channels, 2 roles channels, 5 news channels, leaving lastly about 16 for people to talk in. Affiliations We have started an affiliation program with the Prince of Slytherin server, which also did grew to nearly 1.000 users in the last year. Shout out to Ozzie there and his amazing work he provides. Birth of LVE LeadVonE is dead, long live LVE! Stats - 1.472 users on Discord - 20 released audio chapters - 24 recorded audio chapters - 49-ish released DP&SW chapters - 61 patrons for LeadVonE's original work Overall Summary I'm overall very happy with the stuff the community achieved and how stuff developed since last December. Last but not least I can hint as much that there will be a lot more amazing things coming in the future. Category:Blog posts